Daniel Harding brings his Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra to the BBC Proms on August 29 for Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony. Alas, the season will not feature the delectable artistry of Maria João Pires, but at least she makes a welcome appearance here as sublime soloist in Beethoven’s Third and Fourth Concertos. A “deeply personal relationship with Beethoven’s genius”, “penetrating and passionate” boasts the back-cover blurb about Pires’s playing, and nobody who treasures pianism at its most perceptive and communicative is going to gainsay such a glowing assessment.

Inside, in place of the usual notes about the music, Pires herself tackles the question of interpretation, arriving at the conclusion that its essence lies in a “civilised conversation where composer and performer lend each other their ears, so to speak, across borders and centuries”. She refers to the “primal simplicity, so often forgotten, which is present deep inside each one of us, waiting to respond when summoned”. Of course, you have to be a Pires to be able to respond with the sort of magical acuity that marks her own performances, but it is exactly the close colloquy between the composer and his interpreter that comes across in these two concertos.

The disc is dedicated to the memory of Claudio Abbado, who died in January and with whom Pires made outstanding recordings of Mozart concertos.

Harding was his assistant during Abbado’s days at the Berlin Philharmonic in the Nineties. Something of Abbado’s limpid clarity is reflected here in the playing of the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, though Harding, in contrast with Abbado’s almost uncanny artlessness, is a conductor who rather more self-consciously tends to dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s in terms of phrasing, accent and dynamic shading.

None the less, the Swedish orchestra’s strength, subtlety and sonority establish a good foundation and foil for Pires’s performances here. That wonderfully rounded, opalescent tone that her touch invariably produces is coupled with the insight, poetic sensibility and discreet life-giving force that come from years of experience. It is perhaps significant that Pires, who (unbelievably) has just turned 70, has waited until now to record two works that have long been an important part of her repertoire, but her fusion of freshness and maturity underlines her wisdom in doing so, at the same time earning our gratitude for adding another must-have CD to her distinguished discography.